Free Goodnight, Irene by Jan Burke

by then, but woke with a start when he knocked on the door. After making sure who it was, she let him in. I introduced them to each other, and watched them quickly appraise one another.
    “I’ll leave you two sleuths to do your work,” she said, adding, “Are you going to give Kevin any notice, Irene? I thought we could ride in together tomorrow, if you’d like.”
    The thought of another car ride with Lydia, and my uncertainty over how things would go with Kevin when I told him my plans, led me to decline politely. She said goodnight and went off to bed. To my dismay, my two-timing cat followed her into her room.
    “So, you’ve got your job back already?” Frank asked casually.
    “Yes. I’ve got to let my boss at the PR firm know what’s up, though. I’m probably going to take a leave — this doesn’t seem like a good time to make decisions about my career — I’m too emotional.”
    “All things considered, you’re doing great.”
    We went into the kitchen, where we would be least likely to keep Lydia awake with the noise of our conversation. We sat on stools at the counter. He was carrying a bulky clasp envelope, from which he pulled out a five-inch-thick sheaf of photocopied pages from one of O’Connor’s notebooks.
    “Your pal O’Connor must have never thrown a piece of paper away in his life. The guys who went through his desk told me every drawer was stuffed with notebooks, scraps of paper, you name it.”
    “He was something of a pack rat, I’ll admit,” I said.
    “Well, these copies are from the notebooks. I’ve had someone trying to put them in order all day today. These seem to be the most recent; at least, they are if these dates aren’t in some kind of code, too.”
    “No, no secret date system.” I thumbed through the notes, pleased at how quickly O’Connor’s shorthand system came back to me. “I’ve been reading this code since I was a GA — general assignment reporter — and he started working it out so that I’d always get assigned to his stories.” I laughed, remembering. “Boy, talk about your rumor mill — the paper was buzzing then. Most of them thought he had the red hots for me.
    “Anyway, unlike some of the older staff, he didn’t have any trouble using the computer terminals, but he didn’t trust them entirely — didn’t believe they were very secure. He suspected some newsroom hacker might call up his work somehow, even though there are passwords and all of that. So he used a system of abbreviations, nicknames, and good old-fashioned shorthand notation.”
    As I glanced through them, I saw that most of the notes were pretty routine. Over the last fifteen years, O’Connor had had fairly free rein to pick his stories. Lately, a lot of his work had been on political stories. For every hot item there were a hundred deadly dull ones. He had notes from press conferences, campaign interviews, and so on.
    “What’s this?” Frank asked, leaning over my shoulder to point to a page where O’Connor had scrawled the letters “RCC.”
    “Rubber-chicken circuit,” I explained. “Political fund-raising banquets. Refers to the delicious fare at those gatherings.” I looked at the notes below this one, on the same page. O’Connor had placed a dot with several lines angling off it.
    “See this?” I asked, pointing to them. “It’s a rat’s nose and whiskers. O’Connor used those to mean, ‘I smell a rat.’” I smiled, thinking of him making the rat-nose notation, a hound on the trail of some faint scent. “I once asked him why all his political notes weren’t covered with these rat noses. He told me I should watch out, that working for newspapers had made me a real cynic and that was just another way of losing objectivity. Then he laughed and said, ‘Besides, this means a real rat, not every little mouse that thinks he’s a rat.’”
    Frank laughed, and his laugh made me feel good. The O’Connor in these notes was alive; his wit and sense of humor,